Dead end: A year after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel
Midway in his acclaimed biography of Itzhak Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister (‘Rabin of Israel’), American journalist Robert Slater gives us details of the assassinated leader’s views on dealing with Palestinians. This has relevance even today when we are discussing Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Rabin, one of the greatest Israeli military heroes of the 1967 Six-Day War who defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria to wrest areas for ‘Eretz Yisrael’ (Land of Israel), has an equal role in Israel’s nation-building as the legendary Moshe Dayan. As Chief of Staff, he captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert from Egypt; the Golan Heights from Syria; and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan.
Yet, he was prepared to negotiate with Palestinians even during the First Intifada. As Defence Minister, he told his Labour Party on February 21, 1988, that “you can’t rule by force over one and a half million Palestinians”. However, extremists in his country did not take that kindly. They wanted the entire land to themselves. As The Guardian (UK) recalled on October 31, 2020: “The road to Rabin’s assassination began in Oslo, sealed in September 1993 by a handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.”
The Oslo Accords were transitional agreements signed by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) to establish partnership for negotiating border disputes, creating Palestinian self-governance through the creation of the Palestinian Authority, with hopes of resolving the conflict with a two-state solution.
The Guardian also said that the Opposition, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke at two demonstrations where one of the slogans was “Death to Rabin”. “Israel’s head of internal security asked Netanyahu to dial down the rhetoric, warning that the prime minister’s life was in danger. Netanyahu declined”. Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995.
Rise of Hamas
On January 1, 2009, Daniel Barenboim, the famous Israeli pianist and conductor, wrote in The Guardian that Israel had encouraged Hamas as a tactic to weaken Yasser Arafat. On October 26, 2023, Ami Ayalon, former Shin Bet chief, told Globes: “We built Hamas… It didn’t work, because we didn’t understand what Hamas is... That’s why it blew up in our faces.”.
The links between Hamas and Iran’s Hezbollah originally came through Arafat, the high priest of secular Palestinian nationalism who provided bodyguards to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini while he lived in exile in Paris. He also facilitated training of future Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in the PLO camps in Lebanon. Arafat became the first foreign leader to visit Iran in 1979 following the Islamic revolution.
Israel’s action of pushing Palestinians out of West Bank and Jerusalem into neighbouring countries in 1948 indirectly facilitated these contacts. Another factor which cemented these links was Israel’s mass expulsion of Islamic Jihad militants from Gaza in 1992 to Marj al-Zuhur (Lebanon) for abducting an Israeli soldier.
Meanwhile, Arafat’s incremental journey towards peace talks with Israel, culminating in the 1993 Oslo Accord, disillusioned Iran.
Militants in Gaza did not agree with this and gravitated towards Iran for financial support. Gradually, Palestinian militants started receiving training in Beqaa valley in Lebanon, in camps run by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Palestinian grievances
In brief, Palestinians’ grievances are to peacefully reside in their own land, unhindered and unmolested by massive illegal overseas Jewish migration, water rights, abolition of the ‘Permit Regime’ for their movements, and allowing the return of nearly 7,00,000 of their compatriots who were expelled by the Jewish militia during the 1948 ‘Nakba’.
They also want Israel to remove the West Bank wall, which Israel calls the “security wall”. Human rights organisations like B’Tselem (Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) call it the “Apartheid wall” — to put as much Palestinian land and as many Israeli settlements as possible on the western, or Israeli side, while placing as many Palestinians as possible on the eastern side, effectively annexing large areas of Palestinian land.
Palestinian demands are legal under the UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution No. 181(ii) of November 29, 1947, defining the future government of Palestine, partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under UN rule. True, it was the Arab coalition which used force to prevent partition by invading Palestine. However Jewish militias launched attacks on Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. Although Israel won the 1948 war, the UN has been urging Israel to allow the 50 lakh Palestine refugees to return.
Flouting UN resolutions
Israel has been attempting to push the remaining Palestinians also into the neighbouring Arab countries. I had observed this approach early in the 1980s while I was attending, as a visitor, a Council of Europe seminar on Palestine in Strasburg. When the then Syrian foreign minister Abdul Halim Khaddam raised the West Bank situation, the Israeli delegate stoutly opposed it, saying that Palestinians already had a state, which was Jordan.
As a result, 56 lakh refugees, registered by the UN refugee organisation (UNRWA), are cramped in about 68 refugee camps. Some of these were bombed by Israel during the ongoing Hamas-Lebanon wars.
On May 15, Palestinians all over the world observed ‘Nakba Day’ as the anniversary of their displacement from their homeland. On May 17, 2024, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) conducted a seminar on the “Ongoing Palestinian Nakba”.
‘Nakba’ means catastrophe in Arabic. That was the process of ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland whereby majority of the present 1.48 crore Palestinians live outside of what was once their Palestine.
On September 26, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the UNGA to stop the Gaza war as “Israel had almost entirely destroyed Gaza, and it was no longer fit for life”. On October 3, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani termed the crisis a “collective genocide”.
Israel has ensured security?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the bloodiest discords in the history of mankind. According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, the official organ of the State of Palestine, recognised by 145 of the 193 UN member states, nearly 1,34,000 Palestinians and Arabs have been killed since 1948 when the partition of Palestine came into force. As against this, Israeli casualties from different sources were nearly 10,000.
Before the 2023-24 Gaza war, Israel had fought the Hamas in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, which killed nearly 6,400 Palestinians against 300 Israeli deaths.
The latest series of clashes started when Hamas unleashed the most violent attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 Jews and taking 240 as hostages. As this is written, it has spiralled out of control extending to Lebanon, where Israel is battling with Hezbollah, killing their supreme leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, while Iran has entered the battle by sending hundreds of ballistic missiles on October 1.
Rise and Kill First
In 2018, I reviewed Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s book ‘Rise and Kill First’, which claimed that Israel had “assassinated more people than any other country in the western world” — some 2,300 ‘targeted killing operations’, most of them against Palestinians, but also aimed at Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians and others.
He quotes a scene on March 14, 1988, when the then Israeli finance minister Moshe Nissim, son of the chief Rabbi of Israel, persuaded the cabinet to kill PLO leader Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), who was Arafat’s closest ally, quoting a Talmudic precept: “If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”
Bergman said that Abu Jihad’s killing had the opposite effect: it intensified the First Intifada, which lasted till 1993, killing 277 Israelis and 1,962 Palestinians. It also proved foreign minister Shimon Peres’ earlier warning that Abu Jihad was a moderate who could have checked Arafat.
The author quoted Aman’s (Military Intelligence) chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, after the killing: “He (Abu Jihad) could have made a significant contribution to the peace process.” The author concluded: “If the adored and charismatic Abu Jihad had been alive, Hamas might not have been able to consolidate large parts of the Palestinian public.”
The second wrong decision was the assassination of moderate Lebanese Shia leader Abbas al-Mussavi in southern Lebanon. On February 16, 1992, Israel proudly described it as the first drone-guided ‘Hellfire’ missile assassination in the world. It was to check the growing Iranian influence on Hezbollah. This also backfired as Mussavi’s successor, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, “was blacker than black”, more radical than Mussavi.
Nasrallah chose Imad Mughniyeh to intensify guerilla tactics to get rid of Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. He rained Iranian rockets on northern Israel, attacked a synagogue in Istanbul, killed the Israeli embassy’s security officer in Turkey and attacked their embassy in Argentina, all within days of Mussavi’s killing. Nasrallah made things so difficult that Israel was forced to vacate southern Lebanon in 2000.
Nasrallah’s assassination
Now that Nasrallah has been assassinated, does Benjamin Netanyahu feel that Israel would be safer? The Times of Israel (September 29), quoting Channel 12, said the US was hoping for a pause in Israeli action through the efforts of Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer. “Once the hit on Nasrallah took place, the US was left with a feeling of having been misled.” The same was revealed by Lebanese foreign minister Abdallah Bou Habib to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire hours before Nasrallah was killed by Israel’s bunker-buster bombs in Beirut. He claimed that Nasrallah’s consent was communicated to the French and the Americans. The two western powers had confirmed to Lebanon that Prime Minister Netanyahu was in the picture.
Iran’s missile attacks
Opinions differ whether Iran was able to inflict retributive punishment on Israel. Some retired US military intelligence officials said that only 60 per cent of the missiles were intercepted with American help, while 30 per cent hit the targets. However, President Joe Biden said that it was a failure. France 24 said that Iran might fire ballistic Fattah-1, which could bypass Israeli air defences, if Israel chooses to hit back.
That America holds the key to the present strife is borne out by President Biden’s statement on October 3 that “the idea of Israel striking Iran’s oil in retaliation for ballistic missile attack was in discussion”. The American media compared this to the stern message President Ronald Reagan had given to then Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1982 to stop using cluster bombs on the civilian population in Beirut, which he described as “holocaust”.
— The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. Views are personal
